Saving Time : Flight Workers Mark Anniversary With Capsule to Be Sealed 25 Years

When you design rockets, spy planes and space shuttles for a living, perhaps it’s impossible to build just a regular old time capsule.

The aluminum version the folks at Dryden Flight Research Center unveiled Monday--in a ceremony held 50 years to the day after scientists came to the Antelope Valley to build a supersonic rocket-plane--could hardly have been constructed or filled anywhere else.

Designed by 25-year-old aerospace engineer DiDi Olney--who old-timers figured might actually be around when it is reopened 25 years from now--the 18-by-36-inch canister is a never-used fuel tank from an old Convair 990 research plane.

Workers machined it and smoothed it. They installed a flange and an “environmental seal.” Then they filled it.

Inside are schoolchildren’s predictions of what flight will be like in 2020--a plane that flies under water, for example, and curiously requires a 14-year-old pilot to fly it. There are computer discs and the hardware to make them work when, as Dryden Associate Director Joe Ramos said, they will certainly be viewed in the same manner that eight-track music tapes are today.

There are such quintessentially Dryden goodies as an Anderson Current Loop Demonstration Circuit, an explanation of which, Olney seemed to indicate, would be useless to anyone not tutored by Einstein.

When the capsule was loaded, employees capped the silver-blue tube, sealed it and pumped in nitrogen gas to protect its contents.

But they didn’t bury it, the usual fate of such capsules. Instead, under the desert sun, workers placed the time capsule on the seat of the Bell X-1E, now a museum-type display atop a stand in front of their office building.

The X-1E is the sister craft of the X-1--the plane those very first scientists came to build, the one Chuck Yeager used to punch a hole through the most imposing flight barrier of the day, the sound barrier.